Corpus and Sociolinguistics

Investigating age and gender in female talk

Age is by far the most underdeveloped of the sociolinguistic variables in terms of research literature. To-date, research on age has been patchy and has generally focused on the early life-stages such as childhood and adolescence, ignoring, for the most part, healthy adulthood as a stage worthy of scrutiny. This book examines the discourse of adulthood and accounts for sociolinguistic variation, with regards to age and gender, through the exploration of a 90,000 word age-and gender-differentiated spoken corpus of Irish English. The book explores both the distribution and use of a number of high frequency pragmatic features of spoken discourse that appear as key items in the corpus. Part 1 of the book provides an introduction, a theoretical overview of age as a sociolinguistic variable and a description on how to compile a small spoken corpus for sociolinguistic research. Part 2 consists of five chapters which investigate and explore key features such as hedges, vague category markers, intensifiers, boosters and high-frequent items of taboo language in relation to the variables, age and gender. The book is of interest to undergraduates or postgraduates taking formal courses in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, pragmatics or discourse analysis. It is also of interest to students and researchers interested in using corpus linguistics in sociolinguistic research.

“Recent years have seen advances in how sociolinguists incorporate age into their analyses of variation. Murphy’s work is a fine example of this. Working from a large corpus, and analysing variation in a number of different features, she sheds light on core concepts such as apparent time and age-grading, and meshes quantitative and qualitative perspectives in a way that will inform and stimulate readers at all levels.”

Miriam Meyerhoff, University of Edinburgh

“This book addresses several gaps in the research literature. It examines age variation, which has received surprisingly little attention, and also the interplay of age and gender in their impact on language use. The analysis focuses on pragmatic phenomena often neglected in variational linguistics and is based on a corpus of spoken Irish English, still an understudied variety regarding language-use conventions. The book is highly recommended to anyone interested in sociolinguistics and pragmatics, in corpus linguistic methodology and the study of Irish English.”

Klaus P. Schneider, University of Bonn

“In "Corpus and Sociolinguistics: Investigating Age and Gender in Female Talk", Bróna Murphy accomplishes a great deal, and among these accomplishments is providing evidence of the usefulness of small corpora to answer big questions in linguistic research.”

Lamont D. Antieau, Milwaukee, WI, on Linguist List 23.2334, 2012

“Corpus and Sociolinguistics: Investigating Age and Gender in Female Talk is a much-needed empirical study of changes in language use as individuals, particularly women, age. Murphy's work should be seen as possibly opening up a research tradition, rather than providing a definitive final word on the subject of changes in language use as individuals progress later into adulthood. Murphy has, without a doubt, identified a gap in the research literature needing to be filled, both in terms of topic of the volume (changes in language use in later adulthood) and the methods used to study the topic (corpus linguistics). Indeed, scholars of many different stripes should find Corpus and Sociolinguistics a valuable addition to the the research literature.”

Raymond Oenbring, The College of the Bahamas, in Journal of Language and Politics Vol. 12(1): 152-154, 2013

Cited by

Cited by other publications

No author info given

2013.
In A Dictionary of Varieties of English,
► pp. 363 ff.

No author info given

2014.
In A Corpus Linguistic Approach to Literary Language and Characterization [Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 18],

No author info given

2014.
In A Corpus Linguistic Approach to Literary Language and Characterization [Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 18],

2018.
In On ´doing friendship´ in and through talk: Exploring conversational interactions of Japanese young people,

Zhang, Grace & Vahid Parvaresh

2019.
In Elastic Language in Persuasion and Comforting,
► pp. 259 ff.

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